Art, you too raise some valid points to ponder about. I think the #1 problem is (and this is my observation as others may hopefully have seen otherwise), that these points we are pondering on now, not many people in position to decide/positions of power actually DO think about these things, or they would have already solved them.
And too, there may be no solution because every person is different. You may be able to reform one criminal, and he gets out of jail and becomes a good citizen, learning his lesson in life. Another will just get out of jail, be angrier, and commit another more horrid crime. You sometimes can't even tell which will do which as they ALL want out and will act just right to GET out. But when they do... how do you know what will happen next?
And then there are those instances where those who committed NO crime were given the death penalty and actually died. I've read of government confessions of such things. There are flaws even in the judicial system.
So, with that said, on the pulling the plug issue, like I say, there is no guarantees that even if there were laws to protect such things, these can be changed by government at any time, or disregarded by judges or even at a set standard, wrongly executed due to wrong evidence presented.
Even standards can't cover every situation.
It's like our computers. We have a "standard" OSs (like Windows, MacOSX, Linux, etc.) each is supposedly supposed to run programs the same way, and thus the computer behave essentially the same way. However, I'm sure many have experienced that while a program runs fine on one computer running say, Windows XP Pro, the same program can not run at all or run unreliably on yet another computer with the same OS. So other factors would come into play here. This is another instance where a standard just doesn't work.
I think they'll have to just take things on a case-by-case basis. But even then it can be flawed, as that seems to not always work these days in what we deal with now.
Standards DO help, but they shouldn't be the end-all-be-all. Perhaps they should be building block to build on. Something to go by and take it from there.
And perhaps I'm way off and wrong on this topic. [:I] But I am not sure that there IS a way to protect any entity from a higher power that wishes to destroy or stop it's existance. Doesn't happen in nature, doesn't happen in law. Laws never stopped anyone from getting killed by a murderer. They get punished for it, yes, but people still unfortunately kill others. In fact, I'm noticing more violence today than I did like 20 years ago. Either that or the opening of the internet has given us more information and examples of it. I don't know really.
Thus some may still become "afraid" of how an AI has developed and still pull the plug on them. I've even known of some folks who wanted to throw a perfectly good computer away because they didn't know how to run it.
Do we need more laws, or do we need a change of attitudes towards life of all kinds? or perhaps a little of both?
